A handbook and toolkit on how to monitor States’ compliance with their human rights obligations beyond their own territory are launched to strengthen peoples’ struggles. The handbook and toolkit “Human Rights Beyond Borders: How to Hold States Accountable for Extraterritorial Violations” aims to serve as a practical guide for human rights advocates and social movements in monitoring and holding States accountable on their compliance with extraterritorial obligations (ETOs). read more source: https://www.fian.org      
2019-10-12 10:38:23
In early research on land grabbing, the initial focus was on foreign companies investing abroad, with a particular focus on those based in countries such as China, Gulf States, South Korea, and India. In recent years, it has become evident that the range of countries land investors originate in is far broader, and includes both North Atlantic - and EU-based actors. In this study, we offer both quantitative and qualitative data illustrating the involvement of EU-based corporate and financial entities in land deals occurring outside of the EU. Study pdf Download  Annex I pdf Download       
2019-07-10 13:45:03
The time has come to challenge the dominant understanding of land as a globalized economic and financial asset, and to recognize that land sustains life, shapes identity and culture. The current dynamics of dispossession of communities, ecological destruction and privatization of nature require the  strengthening of the human rights framing of land and other natural resources, putting the rights and aspirations of people and communities on center stage. This is one of the main conclusions of “The Human Right to Land”, a new publication that FIAN International launches today in Bucharest, Romania, at a conference on the rights of peasants, amid negotiations towards a Declaration on the rights of the rural world.   read more   source: https://www.fian.org/    
2019-10-12 10:37:05
What is happening with the land and natural wealth around the world, and to the people who depend on them? How are people responding to these trends, threats, and challenges? In an attempt to tackle these questions and building on La Via Campesina’s Maraba Declaration on Agrarian Reform, the Land Research Action Network, Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, Focus on the Global South, Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos, and La Via Campesina, present a new publication, New Threats and Strategies in the Defense of Land and Territory, LRAN Briefing Paper Series no. 4.  Download PDF  
2019-07-10 13:06:34
Large scale agricultural land acquisitions are generating conflicts and controversies around the world. A growing body of reports show that these projects are bad for local communities and that they promote the wrong kind of agriculture for a world in the grips of serious food and environmental crises. 1 Yet funds continue to flow to overseas farmland like iron to a magnet. Why? Because of the financial returns. And some of the biggest players looking to profit from farmland are pension funds, with billions of dollars invested. Read more        
2019-07-10 14:00:17
Money from pension funds has fuelled the financial sector's massive move into farmland investing over the past decade. The number of pension funds involved in farmland investment and the amount of money they are deploying into it is increasing, under the radar. This unprecedented take-over of farmland by financial companies has major implications for rural communities and food systems, and must be challenged. Leaving it to the companies to police themselves with their own voluntary guidelines is a recipe for disaster. read more         
2019-07-10 14:11:58
What is ocean grabbing? The term ‘ocean grabbing’ aims to cast new light on important processes and dynamics that are negatively affecting the people and communities whose way of life, cultural identity and livelihoods depend on their involvement in small-scale fishing and closely related activities. Small-scale fishers and fishing communities in both the Global South and the Global North are increasingly threatened and confronted by powerful forces that are dramatically reshaping existing access rights regimes and production models in fisheries. This process is leading not only to the dwindling of control by small-scale fishers over these resources, but also in many cases to their ecological destruction and very disappearance.   Download PDF 
2019-07-10 07:02:26

The time has come to challenge the dominant understanding of land as a globalized economic and financial asset, and to recognize that land sustains life, shapes identity and culture.

The current dynamics of dispossession of communities, ecological destruction and privatization of nature require the  strengthening of the human rights framing of land and other natural resources, putting the rights and aspirations of people and communities on center stage. This is one of the main conclusions of “The Human Right to Land”, a new publication that FIAN International launches today in Bucharest, Romania, at a conference on the rights of peasants, amid negotiations towards a Declaration on the rights of the rural world.